The Guardian profile: Roman Polanski

The director of Rosemary's Baby and The Pianist is suing Vanity Fair over an allegation that he tried to seduce a woman at the time of his murdered wife's funeral. But a charge of statutory rape may return to haunt him in court

Jack Nicholson tells a classic anecdote about Roman Polanski, the Oscar-winning film director whose libel trial against Vanity Fair begins in the high court in London today.

On the set of Chinatown, Polanski's noir thriller from the 70s, the director was rehearsing his cameo, playing a pugnacious wiseguy who rips open Nicholson's nose with a blade. Polanski used his own knife - not a prop - and reassured Nicholson that everything would be fine. The knife was hinged on one side and as long as he inserted the blade into Nicholson's nostril with the hinge facing the direction he was going to wrench it, the blade would safely fold back into the handle.

But would he remember which way round to shove it in? Cheerfully, Polanski would flip the knife over and over before each take. Just to make sure Nicholson's expression of fear was the real thing.

The 71-year-old Polanski has a body of work which is rich in violence, transgression and horror. In his great period there is the psychological nightmare Repulsion (1965), his demonic shocker Rosemary's Baby (1968); there is Chinatown (1974) and his paranoid thriller The Tenant (1976). These could be a displacement or transformation or exorcism of all the terrible things that have happened in Polanski's life, which include imprisonment in the Krakow ghetto as a child and witnessing his parents being taken away to a Nazi concentration camp. His father returned, his mother did not.

But he has a dark and ambiguous reputation as a man who is both victim and culprit, an ambivalent emblem of the licentious 60s and 70s. He is famous for being married to Sharon Tate, who was murdered by the Manson cult in 1969, and notorious for admitting to sex with a 13-year-old girl eight years later and fleeing the US to France to evade imprisonment, where he still resides.

All these things had been fading into memory. Polanski's victim, now a 40-year-old mother of three, has publicly forgiven him. His wartime drama The Pianist (2002), garlanded with the Cannes Palme D'Or and an Academy Award, had almost redeemed him.

But now he wants to reopen old wounds, by suing Vanity Fair for libel in the amenable British courts - on the grounds that it is on sale in the UK - for a 2002 article that claimed he had tried to seduce a woman in a New York restaurant at the time of Tate's funeral. He vigorously denies the allegation.

The judgement may go his way. But by making his private sexual conduct an admissible subject for debate, might his reputation be sullied all over again?

Polanski fought for the right to testify from Paris by videolink, because he fears extradition to the US from Britain. Won't that simply be a self-defeating reminder of his culpable past? It could be a calculated risk for a man who, fortified by the respect accorded to his prizes and grey hairs, wants to confront the dark heart of his past and set the record straight for good and all.

Nick James, the editor of Sight and Sound magazine, says: "It is a slur on their relationship, and if it turns out to be false then Polanski will have been fully justified in taking action, and he is defending a different aspect of his integrity than that which was damaged after the underage case."

"I like the man," says Geoff Andrew, the National Film Theatre's programmer, who has met and interviewed Polanski many times. "He always struck me as a very genuine sort of guy, a very courteous and a very old-fashioned person. He is incensed by this article, simply on the grounds of inaccuracy. He feels quite rightly he has been treated badly in the press. This is a smear upon his love for her."

Polanski was born in Paris in 1933 to a Jewish father and Roman Catholic mother; they were Poles who moved to Krakow when he was three. When the Germans invaded the Polanskis were imprisoned in the ghetto, and in 1943 the Nazis ordered the civilians to move out. His father managed to cut a gap in the barbed-wire fence and told the terrified Roman to flee to the house of a family he had paid to look after him. "Get away!" he hissed at the sobbing boy, as the SS officers were ordering the Jewish men to line up. Roman ran, never looking back.

Later he was to discover that his mother was murdered in the gas chambers but his father, though pressed into slave labour in a stone quarry, survived. The boy wandered the countryside, living hand to mouth, being taken in by friends and strangers.

After the war, Polanski was reunited with his father and became entranced by movies; he attended the renowned Lodz film school.

After his breakthrough film of 1962, the Oscar-nominated Knife in the Water, Polanski came to London and made one of his undisputed masterpieces: Repulsion, about the paranoia and madness of a young Frenchwoman alone in London, played by Catherine Deneuve. His reputation as a master of nightmarish fear was growing.

On the set of his uncertain, wacky comedy-horror picture, The Fearless Vampire Killers, he met and fell in love with Tate, and married her in London - having divorced his first wife, the Polish actor Barbara Lass-Kwiatkowska.

Riding high, Polanski moved to Hollywood, and under the patronage of the Paramount producer Robert Evans directed his next masterpiece, Rosemary's Baby. It still stands up as an almost unwatchably disturbing story of a young woman, played by Mia Farrow, who is impregnated by the devil.

At the height of his success, tragedy struck. In August 1969 the pregnant Tate was murdered by the Manson gang, who stormed Polanski's California home while he was away.

The worldwide fame of his satanic thriller Rosemary's Baby clouded the sympathy to which he was entitled. Manson may have been inspired by The Beatles' White Album, but there is no evidence that he had even seen Rosemary's Baby. Nevertheless, the horror of Tate's death, intensified by the unjustly ironic coincidence of art and life, crushed Polanski.

Heartbroken and stunned by the revelation that the new world was just as barbaric as the old, Polanski returned to Europe and threw himself into his work, directing a well-received version of Macbeth.

He returned to the US for his next commercial breakthrough, and arguably the film which he never surpassed: the neo-noir thriller Chinatown. It made a star of Nicholson in the classic gumshoe role and created a vivid and semi-mythical history for Los Angeles.

His success was once again to be wrecked, this time by his own actions: he was charged with the statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl in Nicholson's jacuzzi. Polanski pleaded guilty but panicked, skipped bail and fled to France, where he had already taken citizenship and from where he could not be extradited.

After this inglorious debacle, his career went into the doldrums for almost 20 years. A stately adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Tess - shot in France -won subdued respect and even an Oscar nomination but it hardly showed the éclat of his great work.

His comedy Pirates (1986) was panned; his sub-Hitchcockian thriller Frantic (1988), starring Harrison Ford, was considered conservative and staid. An erotic thriller, Bitter Moon (1992), did no better, though it promoted the career of a young Hugh Grant, and he was not to find a resounding success until his powerful drama of the Warsaw ghetto, The Pianist, which restored Polanski at last to his former status.

He had been forgiven by his young victim of the Hollywood fleshpots and all of the West Coast muttered that at least Polanski had received some measure of condemnation and his victim some sort of closure - unlike many unpunished sybarites of the 70s LA music and film scenes. Polanski had remarried; surely now he could be revered as a great film-maker and artist?

Then the Vanity Fair article came out which crossed the line: openly using the memory of his late wife against Polanski - so he decided to sue.

Tate's sister Debra will testify for him. So will Mia Farrow.

But arguing this out means expending hot air on the issue of who said what to whom in a restaurant long ago. A can of old and unlovely worms will be opened.

Libel cases traditionally turn on the damage to a plaintiff's good name, and the question of Polanski's unexpired statutory rape charge must inevitably arise.

The legendary pessimistic ending to his great film has Nicholson's private eye being told to abandon all thoughts of sorting out the squalid mess he'd got involved in: "Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown."

At the end of all this, Polanski may wish he had received the same advice.

Life in short

Age: 72; French citizen of Polish origin

Education: Krakow Film School (1950-54); Polish State Film College, Lodz (1954-59)

Career: The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), Rosemary's Baby (1968), Chinatown (1974), The Tenant (1976), Tess (1979), Frantic (1988), The Pianist (2002); best director Oscar and Bafta for The Pianist, best director Golden Globe and Bafta for Chinatown among many awards

Family: Married to Barbara Lass-Kwiatkowska from 1959 to 1962, then to Sharon Tate from 1968 until her murder in 1969. Has been married to Emmanuelle Seigner since 1989, with two children

Interests: Trekking

Quotes: On Copenhagen: "What a monstrously boring town it is". On psychoanalysis: "Visiting shrinks is like acting on stage. It definitely screws you up"